There’s nothing more dangerous than a humiliated man. That’s been said before, but no one has embodied that destructive rage on a school more than Andrew Kehoe, the perpetrator of the May 18, 1927, Bath School disaster, also known as the Bath School massacre.
The 1927 Bath School disaster of Bath Township, Michigan took the lives of 38 children and six adults. It is still the deadliest mass murder in a school in American history.
Kehoe stenciled a message and left it on the fence at his farm. It read, “Criminals are made, not born.”
Harold Schecter goes deep into the mind of the Bass School Massacre killer in Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer, check the price on Amazon. Read it on the new Paperwhite which is now waterproof, see the price on Amazon.
In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.
Maniac is Harold Schechter’s gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage and the triggering of a “human time bomb” whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.
Bath School Massacre
The Bath School Massacre took the lives of 38 children and six adults in 1927. It remains the deadliest mass murder in a school in American history.
Here is the schoolhouse before the explosion in 1927. Compare it to the aftermath of the bombing.
Observe the destruction of the Bath schoolhouse from the bombs Kehoe set off. There would have been more if his other explosives had gone off as well.
An additional 500 pounds of dynamite had been set to go off at the same time as the other explosions, but failed to detonate.
Andrew Kehoe
Andrew Philip Kehoe was born in Tecumseh, Michigan, on February 1, 1872. He grew up in a large family and showed violent tendencies early on. Author Harold Schecter writes about the mind of this little-known mass murderer in his book, check the price on Amazon.
Andrew Kehoe may have targeted the school because he was on the school board as treasurer. Whatever his motives were, it was easy to see what triggered his violence. Kehoe was notified in June 1926 that his mortgage was going into foreclosure.
It was after his defeat in the April 5, 1926, election for the township clerk that Kehoe lost it. Only a few weeks later the town experienced a loss that has yet to be rivaled by any other of its kind in American history.
Kehoe began buying explosives in secret and hiding them on his father’s farm and under the school. Kehoe murdered his wife Nellie Price Kehoe and then blew up his farm, driving away as the firemen arrived at the scene. It’s believed he told them to go to the school instead then drove off. After the bombing of the Bath School Kehoe detonated more explosives in his truck killing himself and four other bystanders.
The 1927 Bath School Massacre remains the deadliest mass murder in a school in American history. “There is nothing more dangerous than a humiliated man.”
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